Episode 041 – “A Bargain of Necessity”

I’d forgotten that Big Finish, my dear, lovely Big Finish, was one of the driving forces behind the animation of these two missing episodes. I…love their audio work, and I am very glad that someone made these animations.

That they exist at all is sufficient. Thank goodness.

I must say that, really, the animation isn’t terribly bad in general. The actual animation of people and their movements is just fine. I suspect it was rotoscoped, which is fine. But I really continue to find the overly-animated facial expressions to be very distracting.

When last we saw Ian, he’d been betrayed! Typical. We also catch up with the Doctor and Barbara, hanging out and chatting with no worries about who might be listening outside. Because…they’ve apparently never seen any movies, never read any books, and generally don’t understand how the world works.

So, man, this episode contains a pretty high body count, huh? An awful lot of people get killed, mostly by shooting. Messy.

I will say the overly-animated nature of the faces works surprisingly well when seeing Barbara’s expression when she’s told of the death of her friend. It clearly bothers her a great deal, and it’s very nice to see how well that works.

Overall the story remains interesting, even if it’s not quite as interesting as it was a couple episodes back. Still, the next episode is the last one! Tally-ho!